Horowitz: How many lives could have been saved by aggressive use of vitamin D alone?
It has always been an unsettling thought: What if our government, instead of obsessively pushing policies that were all pain and no gain – masks, lockdowns, remdesivir, and mRNA gene therapy – had aggressively promoted daily supplementation with vitamin D? Well, a new study of vitamin D treatment lead by a Johns Hopkins researcher purports to show at least 116,000 people could have been saved, and those numbers are likely a fraction of the overall benefit with a preventive regimen of vitamin D to elevate serum levels above 50, not to mention numerous other safe supplements and therapeutics that could have been used.
To determine the association between vitamin D3 and D2 supplementation and COVID-19 infection and mortality, the U.S.-based researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study identifying 220,265 VA patients supplemented with vitamin D3, 34,710 supplemented with vitamin D2, and 407,860 untreated patients both before and during the period of the pandemic. The top-line results were that those veterans supplementing with D2 were associated with a 28% lower chance of testing positive for COVID and those supplementing with D3 were 20% less likely to test positive. But the more important results were the reduced mortality from COVID-associated death, with D3, the most common vitamin D supplementation on the market, resulting in a 33% reduction in mortality.
As the authors note, this would have taken a significant chunk out of the COVID death toll. “When we extrapolate our results for vitamin D3 supplementation to the entire US population in 2020, there would have been approximately 4 million fewer COVID-19 cases and 116,000 deaths avoided,” boldly proclaimed the study authors.
But the numbers are much more poignant than their top-line numbers suggest. While the authors researched both reduced COVID infection and COVID mortality for the top-line numbers, they only published the reduced infection – not reduced mortality data – of the sub-cohorts of levels and cumulative amounts of D supplementation. For example, they found that those who were using 50,000 IUs experienced a 49% reduction in infection rates. One can only imagine that mortality would have been even further reduced with high-dose vitamin D.
We already know that serum levels of D at the time of infection matter to clinical outcomes. An Israeli study showed 25% of hospitalized COVID patients with vitamin D deficiency died, compared to just three percent among those without a deficiency. And those with a deficiency in that Israeli study were also fourteen times more likely to end up with a severe or critical condition. A meta-analysis of 40 pooled studies found that vitamin D supplementation correlated with a 65% reduction of risk for ICU admission. Thus far, there have been 99 treatment and 139 sufficiency studies showing a positive association with COVID outcomes.
This could easily have been the most important early strategy with nursing home patients and is still quite important. Those with absorption problems could have been given the active form of D – either calcifediol or calcitriol – to raise their levels, bypassing the liver’s metabolic process very quickly. Studies have shown that almost anyone hospitalized with low levels but given the active form of D did not progress to the ICU thereafter.
Just consider how safe, cheap, and broadly beneficial vitamin D is for so many other health concerns. This benefit was known from day one, yet it is still being kept quiet, even as concerns grow about a virulent flu and RSV season, and we know vitamin D is an immunomodulator against all respiratory viruses. We know almost half the U.S. population is deficient in D (82% of black people), and many more could probably use a boost. Where are the health department bulletins warning about this, as they do for getting boosters of mRNA gene juice? Where is the obsession to test people’s D levels to ensure they are above 40-50 ngs/mL, just like the obsession about COVID testing? Every pediatrician is being incentivized to shove one vaccine after another on children, but how many even know their patients’ D levels?
While we’ve seen many studies before, this massive sample size has a P value of 0.0001, which makes the likelihood of positive association with vitamin D being due to chance almost nil. It’s also published in Nature’s prestigious-access peer-reviewed journal, Scientific Reports.
To this day, doctors like Eric Nepute are being sued by the Department of Justice for selling supplements they say might be beneficial against COVID. Yet the government refuses to change course based on the evidence. At the same time, the government funds and markets the mRNA vaccines with FDA labels that treat them like perfect, sterilizing vaccines.
All red-state legislatures have an obligation to grill their respective state health directors to see if they are promoting vitamin D with a fraction of the gusto with which they are promoting the mRNA gene therapy.